Introducing the interface - Revit Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to take a quick tour of the Revit user interface. So my goal here is really to just introduce you to the interface and how it changes as you're working, and to put a name to the most important parts of the user interface. So we'll start right here with the home screen. This is the screen that will greet you when you first launch the software. Now, it's organized into a column on the left and a big area on the right. The Recent Files area there on the right might look different on your screen than it looks on mine, and that is simply because that area is showing you the files that have been most recently opened on your computer. So everybody's computer's going to look a little different here, so don't trouble yourself too much if yours doesn't look exactly like mine. On the left, you've got buttons to open files and create new files. There is a link down here for Autodesk Docs, which is a way of getting to cloud-based files. There's some help links down at the bottom, and then there's this little toggle switch right here for the New Revit Home. So if you flip that switch, it just reorganizes the way that the recent files are grouped on the right hand side and gives us slightly different information. You've got the ability to look at them in a grid view or as a list view. So it's really just a personal preference. If you like, you can toggle that switch back and turn that feature off. So that's really a matter of preference and a matter of your choice. And I'm going to leave it off for now on my screen. Now, I've got this file right here as my first file. This Sample Architectural Project file. This is included with the software if you're using the full version of Revit, and you could click it right here if it's showing there. But just in case you don't see it there, I'm going to show you how you can get to it without it being on the recent files. At the top here, there's this little back button. And the back button just toggles the interface to the main Revit user interface. Now we're going to look at this in just a few moments, but we really can't talk about this main user interface yet until we get some file loaded. Now, you can really, for this video, open up any file you like. It doesn't matter. You don't have to open up the one I'm going to show, but the one I'm going to show is included with Revit, and you can get to it by going to the file menu. And this is important, don't click Open. If you do, it would display the Open box and you'd have to know where that file is located and browse to it. So I'm going to cancel this, and instead what I'm going to do is go to file and I'm going to highlight Open, and that expands a sub menu to the right. And then I'm going to come down here to this Sample Files entry. When I get here, the file that we want to open is called Snowdon Towers Sample Architectural. And this is a sample project that is included with the software. And I'll just go ahead and click Open. Now, it's likely that this file will come up, read only. That is intentional. you can just simply click Continue to open the file. And now you will see that we are in the main Revit user interface and some things have changed on screen. Now, if you're watching this course in Revit LT, you won't have access to this sample model in that location. You'll have different sample models. Now, you're welcome to open up one of those other sample models instead for this video. But if you want to download and access this particular project, and I recommend you do that because we're going to be using this throughout the course, then what you want to do is go out to the Autodesk website and download a copy manually onto your hard drive. Now when you get to this page, you'll see the Snowdon Towers is listed there, and it's actually a multi-discipline project. It's got models for architecture, electrical and plumbing and so on. And you can see all of those models listed right here. So if you don't have this file in the location I just showed you, for whatever reason, if you're working in the full version of Revit and it didn't download and install with your software, or if you're using Revit LT and you don't have it, then I recommend you come here and download each of these models, even the other disciplines. Now, we're only going to be talking about the architectural model for the most part in this course, but the other ones are linked in. And so it's a good idea to just download them all, put 'em on your desktop. And then when I talk about opening that sample model, you'll just go to that location where you downloaded it instead of the standard default location. So now that we have a file loaded, let's go ahead and take a quick tour of the user interface. So we're going to start in the upper left hand corner at the top of your screen. There's this little toolbar right here. This is referred to as the quick access toolbar or the QAT. Now, those are just a number of common commands and you can almost think of it as like a shortcut bar. It is possible to customize that. So you could right click other tools and add them to the quick access toolbar. You can right click the quick access toolbar and remove icons from it. You can show it below the ribbon. So there's a number of things you could do to customize it. It's your personal shortcuts. I'm not going to do any of that. I'm just going to leave mine right where it is. But that's our first area of the user interface, and you'll find many common commands there. Now, for the rest of the commands that we're going to be using, you're going to find those on the ribbon. Now the ribbon is a very common user interface that you've probably seen in other software. It's not unique to Revit. And you can see that it's organized into various tabs, like Architecture, and Structure, and View, and Modify. I'm going to leave mine set to Architecture. Now you're going to notice that everything is kind of grayed out on my Architecture tab. The reason for that is because of the kind of view that I'm in. So here in Snowdon Towers, it loads up with this Cover sheet active at the moment, and most of those commands on Architecture I'm not able to do in the Cover sheet. Now, one of the things you want to know about the Revit user interface is that it is interactive. So if we come down to this item on the interface, Project Browser, you'll notice a list of items here. I'm going to double click this one called L1. And that's going to open up a new tab. And this is a floor plan view. Notice the change in the ribbon when I do that. All of those buttons that were previously grayed out on the Architecture tab are now lit up and available. Now, we're not going to perform any one of those commands in this video. I just wanted you to see that interaction. So notice that the Cover sheet is still here, and if I click it, the buttons will gray out again. And then when I go back to L1, they reactivate. So Revit's user interface is going to react to whatever you're doing at any given time and make appropriate adjustments accordingly. Now, below the ribbon, we have this long empty gray bar, and it's not very interesting to talk about something that's empty. So in order for that to make a little bit more sense, we need to run a command. Now, again, we're not going to do anything with this command. I just want to show you how this bar populates. And this bar is called the options bar. And what we're going to do is just click this button right here, which is the Wall tool, and notice the change in that options bar. It's changed color and there's now a series of features along there. We've got Height and Location Line and Chain. And again, we're not too concerned about any of the specifics right now. We'll talk about all of this in a future video, but that's really all I wanted you to see, is that the options bar is something you should be paying attention to because certain commands will make use of that space to introduce various options to you. Now, you can cancel the command by coming over here on the ribbon and clicking this Modify tool, that sort of resets your ribbon and the options bar goes back to being blank again. Now, the next part of the user interface that I want to point out is the Properties palette. That is between the options bar and the Project Browser, which we looked at briefly a moment ago. And this is also an interactive area of the user interface, meaning that it will also adjust as you do things on screen. So we're currently in the L1 plan. and it says Floor Plan right here. If I switch back to the cover, it says Sheet right here. If I go back to L1 and click the Wall tool again, now it says Basic Wall right there. If I click the Modify tool, it resets, and it's back to Floor Plan. So again, don't worry too much about those specifics just now. It's just that it's another interactive piece of the user interface. Okay, so continuing along, let's direct our attention now to the very bottom of the screen, on the left hand side, this is the status bar. The status bar is devoted to giving you messages as you're working. So these are just little prompts or little hints about what you can do in the software, or in the command you're in, or at any particular given moment. So just be on the lookout for messages to appear down there because there's going to be lots of really useful information happening in that area. And then finally, we've got this last area over here, this little floating toolbar called the navigation bar. And this just houses various tools for navigating around the screen. So there's a little fly out menu here with various zoom commands, there's a little steering wheel above that, you can see that Zoom in Region is the current command. And if I click on that, I'm able to just zoom in on an area. Now, we're going to go through all of the navigation tools in a future video, but I just wanted to show you that one so that you can get some sense of how that works. So now you should have a pretty good idea of what the various major parts of the user interface are called. Feel free to explore further in this file before continuing. Don't worry about messing anything up in this file. This is just a sample project. When you're done, you simply go to the file menu and choose Close. And if it prompts you to save, you can answer No. There's no need to save anything here. We were just using that for exploration purposes.